1. Field of the Invention
The embodiments of the present invention relate to allocation and disassociation of disparate computing resources of clustered computing nodes. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to systems and methods for providing remote memory access functionality in a cluster of data processing nodes such as for allocating pooled memory resources to a plurality of interconnected compute nodes preferably by enabling memory capacity to be provisioned based on workload on a per-node basis.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, network systems used different topologies, e.g. Ethernet architecture employed a spanning tree type of topology. Recently, Ethernet fabric topology has been developed that provides a higher level of performance, utilization, availability and simplicity. Such Ethernet fabric topologies are flatter and self-aggregating in part because of the use of intelligent switches in the fabric that are aware of the other switches and can find shortest paths without loops. One benefit is that Ethernet fabric topologies are scalable with high performance and reliability. Ethernet fabric data center architectures are available from Juniper, Avaya, Brocade, and Cisco.
A “shared nothing architecture” is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is independent and self-sufficient. Typically, none of the nodes share memory or disk storage. A shared nothing architecture is popular for web development because of its scalability. What is deficient in typical shared nothing clusters is the ability to allow memory capacity to be provisioned based on workload on a per-node basis, to implement memcached functionality on a per-node basis across a plurality of nodes in a cluster, to load/store from remote memory, to perform remote DMA transactions, and to perform remote interrupts.